The Unrest-Cure and Other Stories

The whimsical, macabre tales of British writer H.H. Munro—better known as Saki—deftly, mercilessly, and hilariously skewered the banality and hypocrisy of polite upper-class English society between the end of Queen Victoria's reign and the beginning of World War I. Their heroes are clever, amoral children and other enfants terribles, who marshal considerable wit and imagination against the cruelty, fatuousness, or simple tedium of a decorous and doomed world. This selection of Saki's most polished dark gems is perfectly illustrated with the fine and ominous ink drawings of Edward Gorey, depicting Saki's drawing rooms and garden parties in all their fragile elegance and creeping menace.

"Start a Saki story and you will finish it. Finish one and you will start another, and having finished them all you will never forget them. They remain an addiction because they are so much more than funny."—Tom Sharpe